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September 11, 2013

[A cry for the men to be
hanged went up almost immediately after the woman died of her injuries, and
some of the protesters who flooded the streets carried nooses. In the rush of
emotion that followed the case, the Indian government amended the criminal code
so that the death penalty – legal, though rarely used in India – could be
applied in particularly brutal cases of rape.]

NEW DELHI —
Prosecutors on Wednesday asked for a death sentence for four men who
participated in the rape and murder of a 23-year-old student last December, a
goal long sought by the victim’s family and many Indians who were horrified by
the case.

“There can be nothing
more diabolic than a helpless girl put through torture,” said Dayan Krishnan, a
prosecutor, as arguments began in the trial’s sentencing phase. He called the
attack “a case of extreme depravity,” and made the case that society would be
outraged by anything less than the death sentence.

“The common man will
lose faith in the judiciary if the harshest punishment is not given,” he said.

All four men were
convicted of all the charges against them on Tuesday, but to most, the verdict
seemed far less important than the sentence. Defense lawyers on Wednesday said
the sentence should take into account that some of the defendants were present
for the most savage parts of the attack, but did not take part. The sentence
will be issued on Friday.

A cry for the men to be
hanged went up almost immediately after the woman died of her injuries, and
some of the protesters who flooded the streets carried nooses. In the rush of
emotion that followed the case, the Indian government amended the criminal code
so that the death penalty – legal, though rarely used in India – could be
applied in particularly brutal cases of rape.

“These men should be
hung until death, because they don’t deserve to live in our society,” the
victim’s mother, Asha Devi, told a news channel Tuesday night. And Indian news
services released a partial text from the dying woman’s statement to the
police, which specifically asked that her assailants be executed, as a
deterrent to other criminals.

“They should be hanged,
so that such an incident does not happen with another woman,” the statement
read, according to text provided to IANS, a news service. “They should be
burned alive.”

According to a ruling by
India’s Supreme Court in 1980, the death penalty can only be applied for the “rarest of rare” cases.
Last year, 14 former judges appealed to the president of India to use his
powers to commute the sentences of 13 people placed on death row from 1996 to
2009, after the Supreme Court acknowledged that the 13 had beenerroneously
charged.

The rape of the
23-year-old woman – who cannot be named, according to Indian law, but was
dubbed Nirbhaya, or “Fearless” — stood out for its horror, even in this
sprawling and chaotic city.

The woman was returning
home from a movie with a male friend and boarded a private bus with a group of
men, mostly working-class migrants who the police said had been drinking. While
the bus circled Delhi, the men attacked the pair, knocked the woman’s friend
unconscious and took the woman to the back of the bus and raped her, sometimes
using a metal rod. The two were dumped off on the roadside, naked and bleeding.

Her death seemed to open
a vault here, and nine months later reports of rape still saturate the
country’s newspapers — whether because of increased attacks or increased
reporting is not clear. Under pressure to respond to the surge of public anger,
the government toughened laws on sexual violence. But the drumbeat of fresh
reports offers little hope that this society has tackled the problem, and
foreign women have become increasingly wary of traveling to India.

Judge Yogesh Khanna, in
issuing her 240-page judgment on Tuesday, told the court, “I convict all the
accused. They have been found guilty of gang rape, unnatural offenses,
destruction of the evidence, and of committing the murder of the helpless
victim.”

Prosecutors have argued
that all the men were equally guilty, even though the most brutal part of the
attack was perpetrated by Ram Singh, who was found hanged from a bedsheet in
his prison cell in March.

Defense attorneys
attempted to shoot down that logic on Wednesday, hoping their clients would
receive a life sentence.

In the cramped settlements
that were home to the defendants, some neighbors said the case had cast a stain
on all of them and expressed the hope that the men would receive the toughest
punishment possible. Soon after Mukesh Singh was arrested in December, an
unknown attacker tried to detonate two crude bombs in front of his home.

But Ram Bai, a
wraithlike woman who is mother to the Singh brothers, maintains that her
surviving son is innocent, and has made it a point to attend the trial, if only
to be near him for a few hours. “When I sat next to him in the courtroom,
sometimes I just wanted to reach out and hold my son,” she said, sobbing. “All
I can do is pray to God now. God will be the final judge.”